'It Must Flow' a Life in Theatre Habib Tanvir
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'It Must Flow' A Life in Theatre Habib Tanvir The noted director Habib Tanvir, delves into his childhood as he traces the story of his life in theatre. Interjections by ANJUM KATYAL and BIREN DAS SHARMA appear in italics, within brackets. I come from a religious family. My father was a very religious man. But my maternal uncles were fond of both music and poetry. My father hailed from Peshawar and my mother came from Raipur. We were all born there. I was born in 1923. Raipur is more or less a kind of capital of Chhattisgarh, which consists of six districts. It's a large region: Raipur, Bilaspur, Durg, Rajnandgaon, Raegarh and Bastar. So, it is ethnically compactethnically and linguistically. The dialect spoken by and large is Chhattisgarhi, which is a dialect of Hindi, like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Brij and all the other dialects of Hindi prevalent in U.P. and elsewhere. My elder brother used to take part in plays when I was a child. He used to do women's roles in amateur plays. Once a year in Kalibari some friends would get together and they would put up a play. When I was in school, I used to go to see these plays. They were usually in Urdu. They belonged to what we call the Parsi theatre tradition, because of the professional companies run by Parsis, doing predominantly Urdu drama. There was a whole crop of playwrights that this movement had given rise to; they toured all over India. Many of them originated in Lucknow, then travelled to Calcutta, Amritsar, Lahore, Bombay, all over the country. Mohabbat ka Phool, which my brother acted in, was just one of the plays written by one such playwright, Hafiz Abdullah, and I remember weeping, shedding tears copiously in the tragic scenes. My brother was the beloved of a man who gets injured and goes to meet him and laments. And there was a tailor in our neighbourhood, not too far from where we lived, called Nabi Darzi, and he would tease me, reminding me of how I had wept in that play. That he never ceased to do, even when I was a grown man. I'd gone to Bombay and whenever I'd come back he'd call me to his shop and order a cup of tea, talk about various things, but never forget to add-you remember that day, how you cried ... At that time many amateurs had no recourse to plays other than the Parsi theatre plays. These got printed and circulated and they used to have songs and dances and all that ... I was quite enamoured because in those days there used to be a whole band of musicians Playing outside the theatre to woo the ticket buyer. So there was a lot of drama and tamasha a very festive atmosphere. And of course, the same band was part of the play: They'd move in to start the play. But there was no time fixed. They'd wait for the hall to get filled. So, it might happen at 9 o'clock, it might happen at 10, sometimes at 11-as late as that, because they'd still wait for people and people would come at any old time. And then a long overture, and the curtain went up-it didn't open sideways. It went up. I thought there was some magic in the curtain going up, rather than sideways, because that way we saw the whole cast from feet upwards. We could see the beautiful, flamboyant costumes bit by bit till the crowning piece came at the end-over-painted faces looking very beautiful because they all had lovely eyebrows, beautiful eyes with kajnl, lots of jewellery. Then they'd sing the vandana-the opening song, a hymn to Saraswati or to Ganesh or something like that, just like the Sanskrit theatre tradition. This is how the play opened and i was spellbound; there would be painted scenery, there'd be a revolving stage, Kalibari had very elaborate machinery. I was then about five or six. And then there'd be a dhnnrnkn, a big sound, as if a big gun had been fired. There used to be an iron rod and some gunpowder in a solid iron pot which was beaten hard by that rod. And when you hit it, it exploded and with that explosion the scene changed. And in a jiffy you'd be in a jungle, creating a certain depth with wings, painted trees in a row,ten, twelve, on each side and at the end a curtain, also showing painted trees. So you got the idea of a whole forest. Then there'd be several curtains coming down for the comic interlude. No Parsi theatre play would be without the comic interlude, which had little, if anything, to do with the main plot of the play. UsuallV it was totally unconnected with it. But it was hilarious. It used to be, sometimes, the biggest draw. Sometimes the play was weak but the comic interludes were entertaining and funny, so that people just enjoyed them. There were good actors doing them and they would run as a parallel story side by side to the main plot. There'd be many scene changes, all happening very quickly, in a very slick manner, though this was an amateur group. - My own first experience of taking part in a performance was when I was about 11 or 12. I did a piece from Shakespeare's King John. I played Prince Arthur and a friend of mine, who like me, had started writing Urdu poetry at the same time as I did, if not a bit earlier-I think he was 3 or 4 years older than me, Aziz Hamid Madani; he finally moved to Pakistan and made a great name as a poet; he died recently-acted as Hubert who comes to take the prince away to put out his eyes, and the prince suddenly pleads-if you had a grain, a speck of dust in your eye, how would you feel? It was a small piece, but very moving and I enjoyed it. And I also acted in a big play written by my Persian teacher, Mohammed Isaakh, who became my brother-in-law later; he wrote a play about a young shoeshine boy who's a very bright boy. He's patronized by a rich man, given education, sent abroad etc. He comes back and has a very successful life. That was the crux of the play. And the opening line of that play was: 'Duniya, nrnkknr-o-nbln fareb Duniyaa My drill master directed the play. Being a drill master and a bodybuilder, he gave us movements ~which were very athletic and on every word, you'd have a gesture to accompany it. 'Duniyn'-put your fist on your forehead-'makkar-o-abla fareb duniynn'-move: two steps forward. I found no fault, at that time, with that kind of direction, because 1 knew no better. I enjoyed it. I got an award for acting for both the plays. It used to be called the Thakur Pyarelal Award. Thakur Pyarelal was a very important personage in Raipur. He was a national leader. The school to which I belonged used to be called Laurie Municipal High School and Thakur Pyarelal was some, kind of President there. The award was in his name. He was already quite old then, he must have been in his seventies. I got many trophies for drama, elocution, debate etc. I'm talking about the 30s now. (Now your father, you said, wouldn't have approved of all this?-AK) NJy father wouldn't approve of it in general, but as a school activity he had no objections. However he didn't approve of my brother's theatre activity. He used to do it on the sly, and 1 also weiit secretly to watch the play. No, my father used to be very unhappy about my elder brother, who was fond of all these things. As a child, of course, I grew up saying all my prayers and being as religious as anybody else in the house and in the school, in the madarasa-i was learning Arabic and Persian and the Koran and everything. When I gave up saying my prayers, except on Fridays and on Idd days, my father would t me now and again that you must take to religion, shouldn't give it up, must say your prayers. 'I wanted to join the films.' Later on when I went away to Bombay and started theatre activity. He knew that I didn't have a firm job. He was hoping I'd go into the ICS-I used to top my class, I stood first in my matriculation and I was also inclined to go into ICS at that time. This is 1940. And in 1940 my teachers gathered in my house, including my headmaster Mr Madhekar, who felt that I must go in for Science because I was a bright student and Science would secure me more marks, and had a better future. But I was more inclined towards the arts, despite having obtained a distinction in Botany. I was not bad in Persian, in which I was aiming for a distinction, though I missed it. Just in that year a college opened in Raipur called Chhattisgarh College. But I considered it beneath me because it'd just started and I thought I should go to a good institution. I went to Nagpur, to Morris College, Nagpur University.